01-19-2019, 02:49 PM
(This post was last modified: 01-19-2019, 02:50 PM by suberimakuri.)
I purchased 3x rock64 for a k8s cluster and then an additional 3x rock64 to run HA masters.
What has been a hassle is mainline kernel support and a lack of expertise on my part to get recent kernels working on Ubuntu with an Ubuntu-ish module list.
This is required to make use of newer networking features available in kernel ~4.8+ (Rock64 on 4.4).
Arch Linux runs fine however and has all the modules but packages and Ansible (software tool) use by communities is less than Ubuntu/etc.
I would suggest that before you purchase a stack of SBC's check that they are supported in mainline and/or your choice of OS has mainline kernel packages. If you plan to have the cluster for some time this could affect you too.
One of the SBC's seems unreliable and would crash randomly in cluster or blank OS. I'm trying to RMA it now but of course it's decided to start behaving... This could happen with any hardware though so this is only a factor if deciding between hardware vs vm's.
What has been a hassle is mainline kernel support and a lack of expertise on my part to get recent kernels working on Ubuntu with an Ubuntu-ish module list.
This is required to make use of newer networking features available in kernel ~4.8+ (Rock64 on 4.4).
Arch Linux runs fine however and has all the modules but packages and Ansible (software tool) use by communities is less than Ubuntu/etc.
I would suggest that before you purchase a stack of SBC's check that they are supported in mainline and/or your choice of OS has mainline kernel packages. If you plan to have the cluster for some time this could affect you too.
One of the SBC's seems unreliable and would crash randomly in cluster or blank OS. I'm trying to RMA it now but of course it's decided to start behaving... This could happen with any hardware though so this is only a factor if deciding between hardware vs vm's.